By now you have dived into affiliate marketing headfirst. You have done your research, you have chosen your niche and you may have picked out a few products to promote. If you think this is all there is to affiliate marketing, you are sadly mistaken. 
While having one or two products is great and while those products may bring you a couple hundred bucks a month if you’re lucky, we’re going to take your affiliate marketing campaigns much, much higher.
In fact, you are going to learn how to recruit other affiliates to work under you, how to find profitable programs and how to rake in the kind of money most newbies only dream about. You are also going to learn how to bypass all the competition out there. You may have noticed that affiliate marketing is quite saturated. For the uninitiated, it’s intimidating how saturated it is. You are going to learn how to shrug off all that competition so that you can zero in on your hungry audience. And of course your hungry audience will be comprised of men and women who are all facing a common problem, and who will all pay handsomely for a solution.
That’s where you come in. Let’s begin with affiliate recruitment, which is probably the most profitable way to make money with affiliate marketing.
Product Creation And Affiliate Sales
There is no reason why you can’t create a product of your own and offer it for sale on the ClickBank marketplace or another affiliate-friendly site. With your own product, you make money off of each sale you make but you also make money off of what every affiliate sells, even if it’s just 50%. The more affiliates you have selling for you, the more outreach your message has and the more potential sales you’ll earn.
Since we have been focusing on the ClickBank marketplace for our examples, we will stick with offering digital goods that will do well on that platform. The affiliate products that often do well include:
- E-Books
- Software
- Membership-Only Programs
- Video Series
- Or A Combination Of All OF the Above
You are only limited by your imagination and ClickBank’s Terms and Conditions (or the T&C of any other platform you choose). For our intent and purpose, we are going to create a mock E-book for our audience. This will show you how the process works.
The Product Creation Stage
We are going to assume that you’ve done your homework, that your e-book’s subject matter and solutions are compelling and that you’ve made sure that your cover art and sales page graphics match and are best suited for your audience. We will also assume that you have spent adequate time writing the sales copy for your e-book that includes its benefits, hints regarding the solutions it offers and other information the audience might like to know.
This is your product and we are going to offer it on the ClickBank marketplace. Then we are going to recruit affiliates to sell our product so that we can rake in those big bucks.
Use What You Know To Choose Profitable Products
Before we begin selling your product and offering it to other affiliates, it should be noted that once you learn the process of creating profitable products, you can then use that knowledge to choose other profitable products in your niche. Another way to put it is that, once you start making money, you’ll be able to discern between the programs that are making money and the ones that aren’t.
What’s Your Offer?
Before you start approaching affiliates, you need to seriously consider what you’re offering to your customers and your affiliate partners. If your e-book sells for $39.95, what do customers get for that value? Do they get any freebies? Any bonuses? Is the price worth it?
If your offer isn’t enticing enough, customers aren’t going to buy and affiliates are going to turn their nose up at your e-book and offer. Make sure you add some free bonuses, such as a compendium to the e-book or a workbook, a checklist and anything else that you think might add value. Use your imagination and come up with a few add-on products that will make customers feel as though the offer is worth it.
You must then figure out what you are going to offer your affiliates? Giving an affiliate 50% is standard and is a pretty fair price. Of course, some affiliate programs offer 75% or more and some offer 100% commission.
How can a program get away with offering 100% commission? It’s simple. The product or service owner doesn’t make money off the initial product (e-book). Instead, the seller offers back-end deals that increase the value for the customer, the revenue stream for the seller and the affiliate commissions for the ambitions affiliate marketer.
This is what you’re going to do.
Back-End Sales
In affiliate marketing, offering back-end sales is referred to as offering a ‘sales funnel’. You have your largest audience at the top of the funnel (everyone who lands on your sales page) and your audience then gets smaller and smaller the more products and services you offer.
To get an idea of how these back-end sales work, let’s say that our E-book is titled ‘How to Write For The Internet In 20 Easy Steps’ and it comes with several free bonuses making the value well-worth it. The moment people buy that book, they are taken to another sales page where they are offered more Internet writing related books.
‘How to Write Press Releases For The Internet’, could be one. Another might be, ‘How To Write Internet Articles That Always Hit Their Mark’, you get the idea.
If the person declines to buy the first product, they might be taken to another product, this one offered at a lower price. Or maybe by declining, the person is offered a discount on the original offer.
These constant pitches may seem annoying to the buyer, but they are actually quite effective. The trick is to send targeted traffic to the affiliate offer. Remember all that competition we spoke of earlier? That competition won’t be a problem as long as your product is different and as long as you take what works from your competitors and you apply it to your own campaigns, only you improve on it to make it better.
This takes practice and it takes time, but copying from the best and improving on it is how great things are done and made. Start searching through other products in your niche and focus on ones with back-end deals, particularly ones with recurring commissions every month.
Give Your Affiliates The Assistance They Need
Once your product is live, get on popular Internet forums in your niche and on social media and start making your offer to people who show ambition and knowledge of your subject matter. Only the most ambitious will do. Do not waste your time on someone who is in this to ‘get rich quick’ and nothing else. You only want affiliate marketers who are in it to win it.
Then, you will want to provide your affiliate partners all the help they need. Give them banners, graphics, sales copy, coupons, videos and anything else they’ll need to help sell your product. This can all be placed on a separate page that is accessed only by your affiliate marketers. This makes them feel like part of the crowd and they’ll be more likely to sell for you.
Email Marketing
Don’t forget to get the email addresses of your customers and your affiliates. You will want to be able to contact both groups in case there are any developments, such as discounts and specials, affiliate contests, surveys or anything else. Keep your customers interested and your affiliates motivated and you will soon earn like an affiliate marketing expert.
As long as you pledge to always take care of your customers and your affiliate partners, you will make money.
Now you know how to sell your own product, how to recruit affiliate marketers to spread your message to the corners of the Internet and you know how to bypass all the competition out there. What are you waiting for? It’s time to create your own product and use what you know to find other affiliate marketing programs. If you want to make great money with affiliate marketing, that’s definitely one formula for ultimate success.
